Chapter 2 - The Honeypot
For thirty minutes, we worked in absolute silence. Grace dismantled the hidden bug inside the vase, re-soldering its microscopic transmitter to loop a pre-recorded track of my heavy, comatose breathing using a small diagnostic kit hidden inside her cleaning cart.
"Veronica expects you to be dead by tomorrow morning," Grace whispered, leaning over the heart monitor. "She told Anthony that the poison takes twelve hours to paralyze your diaphragm completely without leaving a trace in a standard toxicology screen."
"Then we give her exactly what she wants to see," I said, a dark smile carving through my pain. "A dying man making a fatal mistake."
I leaned close to the looped transmitter and let out a weak, desperate groan, playing the part of a dying man slipping into delirium. I muttered a specific string of twelve numbers and letters—the emergency override key to my private offshore holding account in Zurich, supposed containing eighty million dollars in liquid funds.
It was a honeypot. A digital tripwire I had created years ago for precisely this kind of betrayal.
"If anyone tries to move that money," I told Grace as she sanitized her hands, "the wire transfer immediately flags the operating IP address and locks every asset under the user's name."
Less than forty minutes later, the silent silent alarm on my encrypted phone—hidden inside the hollowed-out base of the oxygen tank—vibrated against my palm.
Someone had just entered the code.
May you like
I looked at the digital readout. The IP address didn't trace back to Veronica's Manhattan penthouse, nor did it belong to my cousin Anthony's estate in the Hamptons.
The signal was coming from inside this very hospital—specifically, the private office of Dr. Harrison, my personal physician for fifteen years.
